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Imagine if you woke up one day and had the power to change the course of world history by preventing a catastrophic event. That's exactly what happens to unassuming English teacher Jake Epping in the novel 11/22/63, by master storyteller Stephen King, one of the best-selling authors of all time. 11/22/63 has been selected as this year's Barrington Reads title at the Barrington Area Library. Everyone in the community is invited to read the book and then attend special book discussions, lectures, and workshops around the novel and its themes. There will also be a fun, family-friendly sock hop to bring the community together. Librarian Liz Kirchhoff, who began the library's...

Related "Stephen King" Articles

Imagine if you woke up one day and had the power to change the course of world history by preventing a catastrophic event. That's exactly what happens to unassuming English teacher Jake Epping in the novel 11/22/63, by master storyteller Stephen King, one...

HARDCOVER FICTION
1. "Gray Mountain" by John Grisham (Doubleday, $28.95). A lawyer from Manhattan is relocated to a small town full of secrets. Last week: 2
2. "Hope to Die" by James Patterson (Little, Brown, $29).The latest book...

Heading into the new year, the local art house scene is as wide-ranging as ever. Offering an alternative to massive studio pictures, the lineup features small indies, old-school classics, documentaries and foreign films. Here's a quick look at some...

Celebrate the Halloween season at the Ogden 6 Theatre with "Friday Night Frights," a series of classic fright films to be shown at 10 p.m. every Friday in October at the theatre, 1227 E. Ogden Ave., Naperville. All seats are $5 per person. The...

Actors Training Center (ATC) Repertory Company brings the electrifying pop-rock production of CARRIE: THE MUSICAL based on Stephen King's best-selling novel about a young girl outcast with special powers to the Wilmette Theatre stage. CARRIE, which will...

Jennifer Kent was a successful actress in her native Australia when she wrote a letter to art house provocateur Lars von Trier, whom she had long admired but never met. She was seeking career advice — Kent hoped to transition behind the camera — so she...

We picked the best books from 2014 that stood out amongst the rest in a year filled with good literature. Here are our picks.
The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham (Penguin, $29.95)
Sex and anarchy! A...

Logan Scofield, an Oak Park resident and student at Oak Park River Forest High School is part of the cast of teens performing in the upcoming production of CARRIE: The Musical, opening this weekend, October 25th through November 9th.
Actors Training...

Ebola is now part of our daily lives, inescapable in headlines and on TV, in conversations and nightmares.
But it has been part of my life for 20 years, coming at me in the pages of a book titled "The Hot Zone" and then in the presence of the...

Bathing the Lion by Jonathan Carroll, St. Martin's, 280 pages, $25.99
Jonathan Carroll is something of a genius at rug-pulling. In any given novel, it's almost impossible to anticipate when his utterly believable portraits of domestic life might veer off...

When I was young, whenever I'd go into a new house, I'd pretend I needed to go to the bathroom, and instead go searching for a wardrobe that might take me to Narnia.
American houses are big on closets, so I often wouldn't find a wardrobe, but any...

Who I am
Francine Westergaard, a South Sider living in Monee.
One unique thing about me
I have always loved libraries — rows and rows of books! I love to visit museums and libraries when I am traveling to different countries. I was on assignment in...

Walking across Western Avenue on a muggy September afternoon, Gillian Flynn stepped through the rutted pavement of a construction zone and explained with patience and precision how she would murder me one day. Granted, I had asked. Say you needed to...

On its surface, David Mitchell's "The Bone Clocks," the sprawling and unclassifiable new novel by the author of the best-selling "Cloud Atlas" (2004), is a page-turning, time-traveling sci-fi yarn designed to appeal to the "Dr....

They came in abundance on Thursday night to the Richard Christiansen Theater to sneer at Carrie, to mock her telekinetic powers, to laugh at her symbiotic relationship with pig's blood, to chortle at her fate. They came to poke fun at a girl who in 1988...

"Play normal music!"
The woman yelling this at Neil Young stood three rows away from him at the Rosemont Theater in 2004. Between each song, as he spoke to the crowd about the next chapter in "Greendale," the theatrical rock play he...

CHICAGO (March 17, 2014) - Bailiwick Chicago is pleased to present the Chicago premiere of the 2012 Off-Broadway revival version of CARRIE: The Musical, with book by original screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen, lyrics by Academy Award-winner Dean Pitchford,...

Pandemic by Scott Sigler, Crown, 592 pages, $26
When George Romero popularized zombies in the '60s, they were straightforwardly a trope for Cold War anxieties. They trudged and lurched, as vacant as the '50s stereotypes of mindless consumers rising...

With his elegant prose style and keen insights into human nature, Richard Bausch has long been a writer's writer. Over his long career, highlights of which include his short story collection "The Fireman's Wife" (1990) and the novel...

Literary settings often ride the rails of history, so now that we're deep into our second decade of involvement in Iraq, more novelists are setting their stories in the rough terrain of this endlessly fascinating country.
None seems more ambitious, nor...